Preview: ROKR U9

The Motorola ROKR U9 is a music-focused clamshell with a hidden OLED exterior display. Watch our brief preview of it here.

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The Motorola ROKR U9 is a music-focused clamshell the sort of resembles the PEBL. It has a smooth from exterior with a hidden OLED display and a texture-painted back.

It is lightweight in your hand and comfortable to hold. All the controls on the outside of the U9 were easy to find and use.

Body

The hidden display on the front not only shows the time, but it also lets you adjust your ringer profiles and interact with the music player with several touch-capacitance buttons that are built into the display. Using these buttons was not super easy, and they often required several attempts before the U9 recognized that the buttons has been pushed. The limited controls let you play/pause, jump back or jump forward a track. The volume toggle on the left side lets you adjust playback volume with the phone closed.

Even with the less-than-consistent action of the touch capacitance buttons, the living wallpaper and ability to read the display from nearly any angle was nice.

Opening the phone was easy, and the hinge felt solid and strong. It does not have the slicker sliding action that the PEBL has, but is just a regular clamshell.

The keypad and navigation cluster are similar to those that are on most Motorola phones these days. The keypad felt plastic-y, but key travel and feedback was decent. Discreet ridges built into the keypad let you differentiate between rows of keys.

The menus system was simple, and had a small dock-like line-up of applications running across the bottom of the screen. Using the D-pad, it was easy to scroll sideways through the menu items and watch them zoom sideways on the screen. The menu could also be arranged in a traditional grid style.